Chapter 19 - Gender, Biopolitics, Bildungsroman

Summary

Along with industrial modernity’s obsession with planning came the idea that the state should take an active role in planning its population: in Foucauldian terms, the rise of biopower, or the idea that population was a political, social, and biological problem. Francis Galton’s ideology of eugenics, developed in the 1880s and at peak popularity in the early twentieth century, suggested that the state should encourage certain people to reproduce while discouraging others in order to address the problem of the differential birth rate, or the overbreeding of the ‘unfit’ poor, which, it was feared, would lead to the degeneration of the British race. A reformist agenda committed to rational reproduction and national efficiency became central to radical feminist and socialist politics. This chapter explores how literary writing from 1900 to 1920 reflects, circulates, and challenges this constellation of ideologies about gender, reproduction, and sexuality. In particular, it considers how and why early twentieth-century writers frequently turned to the Bildungsroman, a form whose generic conventions depend on and encode both the experience and the epistemology of transition.